A Place Of Refuge

A Drug-rehab Program Modeled After One From Puerto Rico Struggles To Survive

December 5, 2004|By ViCtor Manuel Ramos, Sentinel Staff Writer

Carlos Rios and Jose Dones repeated their sales pitch in Spanish and English as they recently followed shoppers around the Top Produce and Groceries in Apopka.

"Ma'am, do you like custard pie?" Rios asked a woman in a hurry. "Hey, Miss, how about some sweet flan?" he asked another shopper. "Sir, we need your help. Please buy some flan from us," Dones begged nearby.

It took them an hour to sell the first of 25 pies, at $5 apiece. The money was not theirs to keep, though. Rios and Dones, recovering drug addicts, were raising money to support a new Orlando rehab center, where more than a dozen low-income men like them live.

Hogar CREA International of Florida announced its opening in October but is already struggling to stay afloat following a leadership crisis.

The home, modeled after a decades-old organization in Puerto Rico, takes in addicts free of charge as long as they commit to three recovery phases, which can take up to three years .

The proceeds from flan sales are its only income. The sales are also considered therapeutic for the men.

On a good day, about 100 flan are sold to individuals and retail businesses, amounting to $200 above and beyond their costs, said Orlando group director Carmelo Ruiz Haddock.

The men, who also bake the flan and are responsible for the upkeep of the house, call the work tiring.

"Sometimes I'm ambivalent about it, because I just want to leave the house. I feel used. But that's the addict talking," says Dones, 21, who joined the home as the center prepared to open about two months ago.

Hogar CREA is the brainchild of the late Juan Jose Garcia Rios, a former addict who established the group in Puerto Rico in 1968. He believed reforming addicts would be the best counselors for others fighting addiction.

Hogar means "home," while CREA is an acronym for Community for the Reeducation of Addicts.

When Garcia Rios died in 2002, dozens of homes had been established in Puerto Rico and beyond, including several within Puerto Rican communities in Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

Orlando, where Puerto Ricans have become the largest segment of the Hispanic population, was the next logical location. It helped that the founder's son, Javier Garcia, lived in Kissimmee. He started the Orlando chapter in 2001, but the group struggled to grow roots here.

When it opened a home on Orlando's Hillcrest Street some area residents rallied against it, prompting city inspections that revealed zoning-code violations and eventually led to its closing last year. There were at least two other false starts, blamed on a lack of funds and dearth of residents.

The group's home on Eunice Avenue near Pine Hills is, figuratively speaking, the house that the addicts built.

To raise money, several of the local men stayed at a Hogar CREA in Wilmington, Del., sleeping on the floor and working low-paying jobs, mostly at a New Jersey theme park.

They raised about $25,000 for a down payment on the one-story house where the men now share bunk beds and have turned the large family room into a meeting area.

But just as the program was getting off the ground, Javier Garcia, who had become the national president of Hogar CREA, has come under fire. Members of another chapter recently accused him in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Dia of running up thousands of dollars on the organization's credit card. They also said he hadn't repaid a loan from another chapter.

Ruiz Haddock said the Orlando group's board asked Garcia to resign and that he has agreed. No one had been appointed to replace him.

Meanwhile, the group's Puerto Rican headquarters, now led by the founder's sister and Garcia's aunt Julia Garcia, has threatened legal action and said it would sever its ties to the Orlando group. Garcia did not respond to requests for comment.

"This problem has blown up in our faces," Tomas Lamberty, spokesman for Hogar CREA of Puerto Rico, said. "The group's funds have to be used to provide the residents services."

While the leadership vacuum is sorted out, Ruiz Haddock continues to work with about 12 addicts in various stages of recovery. They hope the flan sales will be enough to keep the program going.

"The men are here and they need us," said Ruiz Haddock, a recovering addict himself.

Daily group activities as prescribed by the founder involve a boot-camp-like discipline, believed to help the men develop the strength to fight their own addictions.

It is an unorthodox approach that does not involve licensed therapists, medication or psychologists.

The group director plots the men's days. They are in bed by 9:45 p.m. and up before sunrise. Their morning starts with prayer and repetition of affirmations. Then the group picks one of their own for "confrontation therapy," which consists of sitting in the center of the group while being chastised by peers.